First of all, let’s start with a definition of what we mean by monochrome (or monochromatic). Creating a monochrome chart essentially means only using different shades of one colour. In most cases, this means different shades of grey (or black an...

When you create a data visualisation using R (or any other software), a set of default colours is used. These aren’t always the most effective, or aesthetically pleasing, set of colours. That means that, at some point, you’ll likely want to...

When teaching examples using R, instructors often use nice datasets, but these aren’t very realistic, and aren’t what students will later encounter in the real world. Real datasets have typos, missing values encoded in strange ways, and wei...

I’ve spent over 40 hours so far this year delivering talks and workshops about programming, visualisation, and data science, with several more hours still to come before the end of the year. If you’d told me 10 years ago that this is someth...

Last week I ran a workshop on Parameterized plots and reports with R and Quarto as part of the R/Pharma conference, which I thoroughly enjoyed! There were lots of interesting questions from attendees during the workshop, some of which we didn’t quite have time to get to during ...

Last month, as part of the RSS pre-conference workshop for early career statisticians organised by the Young Statisticians Section, I delivered a workshop on Getting started with generative art. The slides from the workshop can be found online. I&rsquo...

When it comes to crafting visualisations, people often put a lot of thought into what type of plot they’re going to make and what colour scheme they’re going to use. One thing that sometimes get less attention than it should is the choice o...

In September 2023, I wrote a blog post about creating typewriter-styled maps in {ggplot2}. It described the process of creating an elevation map where, instead of using colours to denote the different elevation levels, different letters of the alphabet...

Back in September 2022 I submitted {PrettyCols}, an R package containing aesthetically pleasing colour palettes, to CRAN. If you missed it, you can read the blog post introducing the package! Over a year after the last CRAN release, it was time for an ...

Back in September 2022 I submitted {PrettyCols}, an R package containing aesthetically pleasing colour palettes, to CRAN. If you missed it, you can read the blog post introducing the package! Over a year after the last CRAN release, it was time for an ...

When you use colour to denote the values of a variable in a visualisation, it’s very common to add a legend showing how the colours map to different values. If you create your charts using {ggplot2}, a legend is added automatically when you add c...

When I’m teaching R, I often have exercise questions for students to work through during our workshop sessions. So I need to create a tutorial worksheet. Although we often go through solutions to the exercises in the workshop, I also want to crea...

Waffle charts are a common way to visualise counts or percentages of categorical data. There are already several excellent ways of creating waffle charts in R - including approaches using {ggplot2} or {waffle}. This blog post uses neither of those. Instead, it describes a somewhat back-to-basics approach of simply drawing ...

A Shiny app that automatically updates every week without the need to re-deploy it? Without the need to host a server running R? Sound too good to be true? It’s not. Read on for an overview of how I built a Shiny app to browse and display my #TidyTuesday ...

Last week I had the pleasure of running the Forecasting with generalised additive models (GAMS) in R workshop organised by Forecasting for Social Good. During the workshop, we covered what GAMs are and why we might want to use them, fitting GAMs in R ...

! Undefined control sequence - an error message you are probably unfortunate enough to be familiar with if you’ve ever tried to make a PDF using LaTeX. Until recently, if you’ve been creating reproducible PDFs using R Markdown or Quarto, t...

! Undefined control sequence - an error message you are probably unfortunate enough to be familiar with if you’ve ever tried to make a PDF using LaTeX. Until recently, if you’ve been creating reproducible PDFs using R Markdown or Quarto, th...

In previous years, when it gets to the end of the year, I’ve written blog posts about reflecting on a year of #TidyTuesday data visualisations, or making your own #RStats Wrapped in the style of SpotifyWrapped. This year, I wanted to reflect on...

A couple of months ago I read a blog post by RJ Andrews, in which he described the process of making a map of California using a typewriter. It’s a beautiful map - made using over 2,500 keystrokes, all done by hand. The density of ink for each l...